Defects. Signed lower left "Pet. Bracci Inv. Et Delin."

Provenance: Private collection, Parma.

Literature: P. Consigli Valente (cured by), "Disegni Antichi (Collana Le collezioni private parmensi)", 1988, p. 285, n. 355.

Pietro Bracci was one of the main sculptors of the last Roman Baroque, first a pupil of Camillo Rusconi and then an artist at the service of the greatest exponents of the Curia: protege of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, member (and then prince) of the Accademia di San Luca and of the Accademia Clementina of Bologna, among his works there are many marble portraits of the members of the pontifical court, two statues of Pope Clement XII (one in Ravenna, the other originally located in the Campidoglio, then destroyed in 1798) and, above all, the famous statuary group in the center of the Trevi Fountain, with the imposing Ocean God on his chariot in the form of a shell pulled by two sea horses and two tritons. Our drawing seems to refer to the layout and decorative idea of ​this late Baroque masterpiece, and depicts the moment in which Aeneas, following the indications of the Sibyl, affixes the golden branch at the gates of Dite before heading towards the Elysian Fields : the whole episode, however, is set in a fantasy baroque architecture, almost a "hortus conclusus" of marble where the infernal beings, Cerberus and Pluto and Proserpina are depicted as real marble sculptures. The sovereigns of Hades themselves, inserted in an architecture with caryatids and Gorgon heads, seem to be part of a decoration of a fountain, like those of the Renaissance and then Baroque "villas of delights", or like the group of the God Ocean of the Trevi Fountain.